Avocado Toast: How You Can Eat It Everyday and Still Save Up Enough for a House

An Australian millionaire, Tim Gurner, made headlines last week for saying millenials are unable to afford homes because of all of their incessant purchases on Avocado Toasts.

“When I was buying my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for 19 bucks…”, said Gurner on Australia’s 60 Minutes.

19 bucks for an Avocado Toast! That’s quite a lot to spend on a simple and “sophisticated” meal!

Now what if I told you there’s a way to have Avocado Toast and 4 coffees everyday and still be able to save up enough for a house?

The Recipe For Success

Alright, the first thing you will need are the ingredients:

1 Avocado

1 Loaf of Bread

12 Eggs (Optional)

Butter (Optional)

Wait, SP, are you going to teach us how to make it ourselves?

Yep, that’s the plan!

Why?

Because making food at home is way more cheaper than eating out! And by developing a habit on cooking your meals at home instead of eating out will allow you to save more money and start saving up to the big purchases you want to buy.

We’re not all like Tim Gurner. We might not have a family member who would be willing to give us a $34,000 loan to jumpstart our businesses and magically become the next property tycoon.

But for everyone else, and people in general, we all have a set of hands, which we can use to make beautiful things.

And for this article, we’re going to be making beautiful Avocado Toasts… for way cheaper than 19 bucks.

The Cost of the Recipe

As I live in California, the home of the avocados (I think), I supposedly have access to an abundant amount of avocados.

One Avocado comes out to an average of $2.50 from my local grocery market.

Thankfully, a loaf of bread comes out to about $2.00. A loaf of bread, by industry standard, would be 18 slices of bread with 2 end slices, coming to a total of 20 slices, rendering each slice to be only 10 cents each.

In order to make an Avocado Toast, we’ll be using half an Avocado and only 1 slice of bread.

The total cost of one Avocado Toast comes out to $1.35 ($1.25 for half an avocado and $0.10 for 1 slice of bread)!

$1.35 is way cheaper than 19 bucks!

If we want to spice it up, we can add some fried or poached eggs on top. Adding butter might not be so bad too!

Given that a dozen of eggs cost around $3.00, each egg would only be a quarter ($0.25) each!

This brings up the cost of our Avocado Toast to $1.60, which is still better than 19 bucks.

How to Really Make It

Well, now that you got the ingredients, here is how you make it:

Toast 1 slice of bread

Spread melted butter on top of the bread (optional)

Spread 1/2 of a mashed or sliced avocado on top of the toast

Place fried, poached, scrambled, or whatever style you like of agg on top of avocado toast (optional)

Season with salt and pepper (optional)

How Much Can You Actually Save?

By making your own avocado toast at home, we will effectively save ~$17 a day (19 bucks – 1 to 2 dollars depending on how spiced up your avocado toast is).

$17 a day for an entire month (based on 30 days) would be a total of $510.

Calculate it for a year and it would be a total of $6,205!

Now if this was our only investment, how long would it take for us to be able to afford a house?

Currently, the median home price in San Francisco is $1,167,000.

To save $1,167,000, it would take us around 39 years of saving $6,205 a year with a compound interest of 7% a year (10% from the stock market – 3% inflation).

However, to save enough for a down payment (typically 20% of the home value, which would be $233,400), it would take us roughly 19 years.

But what if we take the money to a different housing market?

Let’s say we want to purchase a house in Texas.

The median home price in Texas is $163,500, which is about one tenth of a home price in San Francisco!

To save $163,500, this would only take us 15 years.

But to save for a 20% down payment?

That would only take us 5 years!

But Really, You Can Save So Much More!

I’m going to go out on a whim here and save that you can actually save so much more, which would put you on fast-track mode towards a new house?

Why save ~$17 a day when you can aim to save $25… $50… or even $100 a day!?

Take a look at your finances. Run through my Simple What To Do With Your Money Guide. Cut back on unnecessary expenses. Don’t eat out as much and create delicious and beautiful foods at home with the two hands you have.

So, my fellow millenials… and everyone else… it is possible to eat Avocado Toast and still save up for a house within our lifetimes (take that, Tim Gurner!).

But the real question I have for you is how far are you willing to go to get you want? Cutting back costs to save more? Getting a new job to make more money?

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8 thoughts on “Avocado Toast: How You Can Eat It Everyday and Still Save Up Enough for a House”

Hahaha! I love the avocado toast phenomenon. But this is a good point. You can typically make your favorite restaurant staple at home, y’all. It might require learning a particular technique, but it’s so worth it once you see the savings. And you learn something new, too. 🙂

Currently sitting at an all inclusive in Mexico reading about this avacado toast thing. I didn’t realize it was a thing or was so expensive. Still I had some this morning included in my room rate… Did I kill my retirement ? 😉

Haha I love this. I heard about this on the radio and live in a red hot market in Canada where A teardown shack of a house is worth a million dollars. No one in their right mind would spend 20 bucks on avacado toast but it also isn’t the only thing standing in the way of home ownership. Great post!

That’s unfortunate that a teardown house is worth a million dollars in Canada. There’s so many houses that are just not worth it and if we just move to a lower cost of living area, we’ll have so much nicer homes.

The only downside to this is that no one likes those places and there’s not much to do there.